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This webpage is dedicated to publish the results of an intense analysis of the MediaWiki DB backend. 4.5 year of development have been analyzed and over 170 schema versions compared and studied. In this website we report the results of our analysis and provide the entire dataset we collected, to the purpose of defining a unified Benchmark for Schema Evolution.

Contents


MediaWiki Schema Evolution: a short Introduction

Evolving the database that is at the core of an Information System represents a difficult maintenance problem that has only been studied in the framework of traditional information systems. However, the problem is likely to be even more severe in web information systems, where open-source software is often developed through the contributions and collaboration of many groups and individuals. Therefore, in this paper, we present an in- depth analysis of the evolution history of the Wikipedia database and its schema; Wikipedia is the best-known example of a large family of web information systems built using the open-source MediaWiki software. Our study is based on: (i) a set of Schema Modification Operators that provide a simple conceptual representation for complex schema changes, and (ii) simple software tools to automate the analysis. This framework allowed us to dissect and analyze the 4.5 years of Wikipedia history, which was short in time, but intense in terms of growth and evolution. Beyond confirming the initial hunch about the severity of the problem, our analysis suggests the need for developing better methods and tools to support graceful schema evolution. Therefore, we briefly discuss documentation and automation support systems for database evolution, and suggest that the Wikipedia case study can provide the kernel of a benchmark for testing and improving such systems.

MediaWiki Architecture

MediaWikiArchitecture.png

Available Data

In order to ease the testing of MediaWiki backend we provide a set of data and installed version of MediaWiki freely accessible.

Installed Versions of MediaWiki

To provide a comparison of the features available in the main MediaWiki Software Release we installed all of them, and they are available to test. [1]


SoftwareRelease.png


http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.2.0/ 13-Mar-2004 08:08

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.3.0/ 02-Aug-2004 09:51

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.4.0/ 07-Mar-2005 18:07

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.5.1/ 22-Jul-2005 23:30

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.6.0/ 05-Apr-2006 03:11

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.7.0/ 07-Jul-2006 10:30

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.8.0/ 10-Oct-2006 15:37

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.9.0/ 10-Jan-2007 12:38

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.10.0/ 22-Apr-2007 14:17

http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/mediawiki/mediawiki-1.11.0/ 28-Jun-2007 18:19


Backend Access To the Schema

To provide further insight we setup an access to the MySQL backend for the above installations. In this way the user can freely access the MediaWiki bakend and test simple queries. The access is limited to reading, in order to avoid vandalism. user: "mediawikireder" password: "imareader" The phpMyAdmin web access is the following: http://yellowstone.cs.ucla.edu/phpMyAdmin/

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